Transatlantic Aesthetics and Culture - Böcker

The Mediterranean world has long had strong cultural links to Great Britain as well as to the United States. Through the analysis of artistic objects and critical writings that crystallise this encounter, the essays in this volume demonstrate the variety and complexity of the connections between two geographical zones and two or more cultures.Mediterranean cultures are shown to haunt American and British culture and artistic productions. The relation between British and American literature and art on the one hand, and Mediterranean arts on the other goes beyond the mere inscription of British and American culture in a Mediterranean tradition. British and American culture and art come out as unearthing a wide variety of Mediterranean artistic forms, renewing and transforming them.This collection shows how lively the encounter between the Mediterranean and the English-Speaking worlds still is. It highlights how much English as well as American culture and art owe today to the Mediterranean ones; how, mainly in the fields of literature and art, the two civilisations have never discontinued the dialogue they adumbrated centuries ago.

This book focuses on the development of Italian American cultural identity throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.Italy is becoming a destination, rather than a starting point for immigrants. Immigration remains a source of tension and debate both in the United States and in Europe. Analyzing the evolution of Italian American identity, from diaspora to globalization, from emblematic to latent ethnicity, can thus prove insightful.Disparate works, including novels, films and newspaper articles, both by Italian and non-Italian American authors illustrate this paradigm. The catalyst for this transformation is the Second World War, which allowed Italian Americans to take part in the struggle to liberate Italy from Fascism, establishing in this way a connection with their roots while adhering more closely to mainstream American society through participation in the conflict. Post-war expressions of Italian American culture include the development of women’s writing, cinematic interactions with American Jews and African Americans, and the works of two novelists, Don DeLillo and Anthony Giardina, who embody different aspects of latent ethnicity.

This volume is the product of a joint effort to bring together critical views "from the Old World" on the field of American Studies. The contributors are leading Americanists working in Spanish academia who believe in the importance of working on American Studies from a multidisciplinary, inclusive perspective. The volume constitutes a testimony to the current state of research on American Studies in Spain, which occupies a key position in the transatlantic appreciation of the field. Ranging from Romanticism to Postmodernism, form the human to the post-human, from the Salem witchcraft trials to the Holocaust, from the Other to the Zombie, from fiction to history, from African-American slavery to Native-American reservations, from Spanish Unamunian philosophy to Whitmanesque poetry—to name just a few of the themes discussed in these pages—this entire volume is grounded on a transatlantic vision and dialogue, which has taken on great importance after the so-called "transatlantic turn." All in all, this book provides the critical gaze of the "expert outsider" who is able to offer a somewhat different but complementary point of view, which can only enrich the general appreciation of American Studies.

Styles of soldiers’ commemoration reveal national self-images. US WW II military cemeteries in Italy and their German counterparts are analyzed as art-historical artifacts. Their aesthetics, together with results of archival research, reveal a self-assured US united in values, projecting victory and Pax-Americana while a struggling Germany searches for its democratic identity and a place within the community of civilized nations. In Italy, the US relied on imported European classicism as taught at the influential American Academy in Rome and interpreted through the personalities of the cemeteries’ designers. Germany’s designs, rejecting Nazi classicism, progressed through an inherited unique blend of medievalism with modernism toward a contemporary style that integrates modernism and expressionism. The US honors soldiers’ death as worthy sacrifice for the nation’s greatness and the world’s future. Germany focuses on mourning and interprets soldiers’ death as tragedy whose only meaning can be an admonition to seek peace.